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In this project , I argue that David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite jest (or IJ ) is both about recovering from addiction through humility , and also it produces that humility in some of its readers by making us feel ourselves to be addicts to a certain kind of reading : a reading to find closure , certainty , and resolution . But , in frustrating the desires for closure , certainty , resolution , etc . , IJ denies readers the satisfaction of completing the fix . It is precisely this denial that prompts readers to re -read , repeating the structure of addiction - -but also destructuring it , by installing habits of reading that pleasure in the failure to close , the uncertainty , the impossibility of resolution - -habits which I treat as humility . Following a thread in the performative theory of J .L . Austin , Jacques Derrida , and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , I clear space for reconceptualizing the performative utterance through an unusual example of a performative utterance : I take IJ to be the utterance of humility . Drawing on Avital Ronell's "narcoanalysis" in Crack wars , I argue that IJ's performative or substantializing work is in exploiting one kind of habit (addiction ) in order to replace it with another (humility ) . The rhetorical transformation (to humility ) effects itself through IJ's performative formation (in the reader ) of the humbled habit . This project is a reading of a performative utterance (IJ ) that produces a rhetorical effect , which effect is the formation of the habit of humility . |
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